Features you need
 

Greetings Garren

Being a news junkie I've also taken a short wave radio with me when ever I've travelled overseas over the last 20 years although with the internet the need for it has been reduced. I don't know what's on the market these days, I have an old Sony ICF-SW1 but I would highly recommend that whatever you get it has the following features

1) Digital tuning with auto scanning feature- You press a button and it will scan through the channels until it finds a signal. This works much better that having to manually tune through a band.

2) Push button memories to store the stations you do find

3) A DX/Local switch to be able to reduce the receiver sensitivity so the channel scanning doesn't only picks up strong signals and not noise

4) The receivers usually have a clock built in. Ideally it should have the ability have two time zones programmed into it. One for local time so you can use it as an alarm clock and the other time zone to be set to UTC (GMT) which is what broadcasters use for there programming schedule. I wish my ICF had that feature but apart from that it works very well.

Good Luck

Ian J

Oh forgot to add, the Freeplay I've got also has a solar panel, which is nice for those sunny days you can't be bothered to wind it up, a little wind up wire antenna which improves things on shortwave and an AC adaptor to charge it, with a nice range of plug adaptors, so it should plug in almost anywhere. If I could throw add anything to it it'd be a 12V cigarette lighter charger, but really that's just being lazy.

I've found that any digital scanning radio eats batteries. If possible I stick to manual tuning.

Good point - cheers for letting me know :-)

SW Radio
 

You won't hear CNN on a shortwave radio. Mostly BBC and religious broadcasters now.

Jim, WW9H